Most of the members of Tiger 21, a network of more than 900 wealthy investors, are entrepreneurs who made their money in the private markets. Now they’re betting more on public markets than they have in 11 years.
Members’ portfolios were 25% invested in public equity in the first quarter, up from 22%, and the allocation to private equity was down four percentage points to 22%, said Michael Sonnenfeldt, founder of the network of entrepreneurs, investors and executives who have an average of $100 million in assets.
Normally, members’ stakes in private equity outweigh their public equity allocation. But as the end of the second quarter approaches, the trend of shifting toward public equity seems to be holding, Sonnenfeldt said.
Overall, the percentage of portfolios that Tiger 21’s members have in so-called risk assets—private equity, public equity and real estate—is now nearing 80%. “That tells me that it continues to be a consequence of low interest rates, where you have no choice but to put your money to work,” Sonnenfeldt said.
Tiger’s wealthy members are also putting more money into cryptocurrency and blockchain plays—but still at a low level.
Sonnenfeldt sees the shifts unfolding as what he calls a “clash of the titans” rages in the form of strongly held, opposing beliefs roiling financial markets. There are those who believe inflation is roaring back and we’re in a stock market bubble, he said. Then there are those who believe this is start of a very long expansion because of the long-term potential of growth stocks such as the FAANGs—Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Netflix Inc., and Alphabet, Inc., the parent of Google—and other technology companies.
That cognitive dissonance has consequences for where investors place their money. “Sometimes when people are a little bewildered, they want the liquidity of a public investment rather than the illiquidity of a private investment,” Sonnenfeldt said.
One driver behind the increase in Tiger 21 public-equity stakes has been to invest in the clean-energy industry. Members just learning about clean energy are investing through solar energy and battery exchange-traded funds, in luxury electric-vehicle maker Lucid Motors via its planned merger with the publicly traded Churchill Capital Corp. IV SPAC, in Nikola Corp., Tesla Inc. and other electric vehicle companies, said Sonnenfeldt. Some members are also looking at General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. as those company’s electric vehicles offerings come to life, he added.
More Tiger 21 money is also going into the the mega-cap FAANG stocks, as well as Nvidia Corp. “Their market dominance is extraordinary,” Sonnenfeldt said. “Even Tesla has extraordinary market dominance—and at a global scale that we’ve never seen before.”
Members are also investing more directly in cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Just as gold has been seen as an instability hedge that Tiger 21 members would give a 1% to 3% allocation to in portfolios, the same holds for blockchain and crypto. In the short term, some members are investing in bitcoin via the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. “Over time our members will ferret out longer-term private equity deals,” Sonnenfeldt said.
Members don’t appear too concerned about the recent drop in Bitcoin’s price, Sonnenfeldt said. “Bitcoin has always had an extraordinary level of volatility, and in that context, the recent drop is not dramatically out of line with historic dips, “ he said. “For those invested in Bitcoin, the dips are of concern but are not yet eroding their long-term view of Bitcoin’s potential.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
